


Dislocation

by fullborn



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Autopsies: The Best Place To Crack Bad Jokes, F/F, Gen, Identity Issues, Light trespassing, Twin Peaks: The Return, albert is a third wheel and very tired, feat. the inherent trauma of being a tulpa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26073652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: Diane takes a break from the Blue Rose and finds a kindred spirit.
Relationships: Diane Evans & Albert Rosenfield (Twin Peaks), Diane Evans & Constance Talbot, Diane Evans/Constance Talbot
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	Dislocation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Sank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/gifts).



> For Beatrice_Sank/[dye-ann](https://dye-ann.tumblr.com/) as part of the WonderfulxStrange 2020 exchange. 
> 
> After seeing Constance/Diane among the prompt list I couldn't think of anything else, so here this is. I got slightly bogged down with the timeline of it all so this is more tulpa centric and less lighthearted than I had initially planned and much longer than strictly necessary 😬 (and of course I had to include Albert!). Hope that works for you!
> 
> Because this is the Return, please mentally insert very long stare-filled pauses between each line of dialogue for added realism. Thank you.

The elevator let out a cheerful _ding._ Diane suppressed the urge to throttle someone as she emerged into the lobby of the Hotel Mayfair with a renewed sense of empathy for the fate of William Hastings, who had been so unfortunately liberated from the upper portion of his skull the previous day. She had slept late. That was not unusual, but the bitch of a headache currently waging war behind her eyes was. 

‘Good morning,’ greeted Agent Preston. She was the sole occupant of the monstrous leather armchair hidden in the dim alcove by the stairs, deliberately chosen for its equally advantageous view of both the elevator’s caged mouth and the slowly revolving door that led to the distant street beyond. Her voice was a sight too chipper for the tender state of Diane’s head. 

Diane glowered. 

‘You look abandoned,’ she remarked, perching on the edge of the low table without ceremony. There was a pitcher of orange juice that she poured into a tall glass, along with a dash of something sharper from the bottle of spirits in her pocket. ‘Gordon off being Gordon, no girls allowed, is that it? He sure knows how to be a real bore.’

‘Director Cole went out earlier this morning. I don’t know where he is,’ Tammy said. Big calm eyes, dark red hair in sleek waves, collected in the face of Diane’s acid tongue as she lowered her book. Diane decided to hold off on the throttling for now, save for those that really deserved it. ‘Agent Rosenfield is down at the morgue, if you were looking to talk with him.’ 

Tammy crossed and immediately uncrossed her legs, coltish, perhaps sensing her companion’s dark mood. It  was a wonder the Bureau hadn’t trained her out of such blatant signs of discomfort, unless Gordon was reviving that strange method of bodily communication pioneered by his last red-headed protege. Diane lit a cigarette. 

‘Similar to the man-eating horses of Diomedes, Albert is less likely to bite after receiving his pound of flesh,’ she explained, acerbic. ‘He’s not his usual cheery self if disturbed before breakfast. And if he’s in the morgue, as you say, then he hasn’t thought to feed himself. I’ll leave you to poke that particular bear.’

‘Mare, in this case.’ Tammy’s right eyebrow raised in a perfect arch, a pointed showcase of expression. ‘Besides, he’s there with Dr. Talbot. She brought croissants.’ She gestured to the brown paper bag folded neatly at Diane’s side. ‘There’s one for you, if you want it.’

‘Smart woman. Self-preservation is an admirable trait.’

The thought came, slipping into her mind as easy as satin on silk, that she might as well get another look at those coordinates if Ruth Davenport’s body was still at the morgue. It seemed as natural an idea as any, more natural than having a cosy tête-à-tête with Gordon’s pet prodigy over baked goods and what looked to be the world’s densest compendium of sudoku puzzles. People who did that sort of thing for fun gave her the screaming meemies. She thought briefly of Cooper, fresh-faced as he had been when they first worked together, calling her into his office to pick her brains about the morning crossword. Even when she knew she had never given him a straight answer. 

Diane plucked a croissant from the bag and swigged her spiked juice. The vodka lessened her headache somewhat, sharpening her vision and her sense of clarity about the importance of the smudged string of numbers written on a dead woman’s skin. Her memory could do with the second shot. 

‘You know what, I _do_ have something to discuss with Albert,’ she said, and unfolded herself from the table. ‘Nothing like a bit of confrontation to get my morning going. No offence, Agent Preston, but until you develop some semblance of an edge the man remains an unmatched conversationalist, if conversation happened to be an Olympic bloodsport.’

Preston raised a thin brow. ‘I wouldn’t put yourself out of the running so definitively.’

Diane barked out a laugh as she made her exit, and thought that maybe Tammy Preston wasn’t so stiff a suit after all. 

***

Time felt strange in the long corridors of Buckhorn’s morgue, with their humming vents and pipes of cooled, stale air mingled with a harsh tang of formaldehyde that made her feel corpse-like herself. The body would be waiting in the fridge. She readjusted her hair into perfect twin sheaths around her face, her own battle-helmet, ready for action as she pushed open the door at the end of the hallway.

The spanner in the works, of course, was that Ruth Davenport’s body was already spread out on a metal gurney under a harsh pool of halogen light. Albert had his back to her, but she could pick his hairline out of an androgenetic alopecia sufferers’ lineup any day. He was blocking the corpse’s arm from her sight. The short woman standing at his shoulder had to be Doctor Constance Talbot, the resident coroner: small, mousy-haired, peering sharply at the body before them. They both turned as the door clanged shut behind her. Albert’s face collapsed into an expression of well-worn irritability. 

‘If you’re looking to be interred with the remains of King Tut, I’m afraid you’ve missed your shot,’ he grunted, turning back to the task at hand. ‘Better keep an eye out for Howard Carter just in case, I hear the British Museum is always on the lookout for fresh talent.’

Diane ignored the jibe. Yes, she was wearing a top made entirely of golden chainmail and enough bangles to weigh her down should she fall into any nearby bodies of water, and yes, she had drawn on eyeliner thick enough to rival Cleopatra that morning, but he was nothing if not predictable in his insults. It comforted her. ‘I left my feather boa at home,’ she said. ‘I’m guessing you’ve already weighed the heart, but if not I can always go out and mug a pigeon. Does it matter what kind?’

Talbot’s eyes cut over Diane’s outfit and hair, paperwork forgotten as she looked between her and Albert with an air of momentary calculation. Most people assumed that she and Albert were long-standing mortal enemies on stumbling into one of their verbal spats, but there had been one foolish patron at a bar they used to frequent who had deduced that they were, in fact, fervent if tempestuous lovers. The poor man had been barely left alive.

‘Any bird will do,’ said Talbot. ‘I’d give you proper direction, but things are kind of _hanging in the balance_ right now.’ She gestured at the body with her paperwork, a grin spreading in her eyes if not her face. Diane laughed. 

Albert let out a groan. ‘Where are my manners?’ He pivoted on his heel and pointed with a bloody hand, without feeling. ‘Diane, meet Doctor Constance Talbot, a woman of many talents and purveyor of enough shopworn jokes to have even Gordon running for the hills. Constance, meet the inestimable and irascible Diane Evans. Although no longer with the Bureau in an official working capacity, she still manages to haunt my waking hours like the technicolour ghost of Sally Bowles.’

‘I’m charmed, Doctor.’ Diane let herself mean it, just to see Albert’s expression go sour.

‘Constance, please. I’d shake your hand, but…’ 

‘Don’t let me interrupt.’

Albert had his back to them again, bent over the table. ‘Unless you’ve learned to reverse the passage of time,’ he remarked. ‘That particular ship has sailed.’ He reached for a pair of scissors and cut the thread in his hand with a definitive snip, stepping back to inspect his handiwork. The body lay before him as it had done in the scrubby field, crudely truncated, the only difference being the neat row of stitches sealing the newly-scored Y-incision between its bloated breasts. Black ink on the forearm, beginning to smudge. Before she could sneak a further look, Albert had pulled the sheet over the corpse with a ringmaster’s flourish and moved to strip his gloves off into the sink. 

‘Find anything interesting?’ Diane asked, feeling Constance’s eyes on her. 

‘I think we might have managed to pinpoint the cause of death,’ said Constance. With Albert it was all salt and grim accusation, even when playing to the room — but with this woman there was something lighter. A self-contained amusement like a nudge to the ribs; the old invitation to get in on the joke. It struck Diane not many people (before the arrival of the Bureau’s most jaded set of old colleagues) did. 

Albert snorted. The gap where the cadaver’s head should have been made a sharp depression in the sheet, drawing her eye even as Constance put down her detailed notes and levered the metal tray back into the gaping mouth of one of the refrigerator doors. 

‘There were a few things,’ Constance continued, bouncing back to professionalism with ease. ‘A rate of decomposition inconsistent with our timeline. Ruth Davenport was beheaded on the 22nd, yet livor and rigor mortis suggest she’s been dead no more than three days. She’s still fairly stiff. Secondarily, venous patterning is more consistent with that of a victim of hanging: the blood pooled in the hands and feet rather than at the back, which is odd if she was found face-up. Or. Chest-up, as it were. Potential levitation aside, there’s no discolouration on the skin; no bra strap, no belt buckle, anything like that, which indicates that her clothing was removed peri or post mortem.’

‘Unless Ms. Davenport and Mr. Hastings were avid subscribers to the free body culture, which I highly doubt,’ Albert interjected. ‘Davenport wore a ring.’ He indicated the corresponding finger on his right hand, almost reflexively. ‘No sign of it being on or _in_ the body, and not at the scene. It’s a real doozy.’ 

‘As for the head, the wound is clean. Almost cauterised.’

‘No medieval hack-job, that’s for sure.’ Albert pulled open another hatch in the wall and deposited a covered tray out onto the gurney. ‘I believe the next resident of Sleepy Hollow is all yours, Doctor.’ 

‘No need to get a…head of ourselves,’ said Constance, pointedly filling out the last few lines of paperwork before handing over the clipboard. ‘We tossed a coin, you know,’ she explained to Diane. ‘I lost, which is why I’m about to cut open my children’s school principal while your dyspeptic friend does the report. My bad, really. I should have chosen heads.’

Diane decided, all at once, that she liked this woman very much, with her irreverence and matter-of-fact competence. Also, Albert clearly liked her too, which was rare as a blue rose itself and just as disturbing to the natural way of things. He was practically smiling, for God’s sake. It was ghoulish. She watched him as he uncapped the steel ballpoint that kept sentry in the breast pocket of his lab coat. Her gaze must have been heavier than she thought because he looked up, frowning, and cocked an eloquent eyebrow.

‘I’m part of the furniture,’ said Diane. ‘Don’t pay me any mind.’

Constance glanced over, that inner humour tugging at the corners of her mouth. ‘I don’t think you could ever be accused of that. You just might be the most intriguing thing that’s been in this room, and that’s counting Mr. Hastings here.’ She tugged down the sheet to expose the bare body, the red mince of his brains gone curdled in his ruined skull. The smell was meatier somehow, a butcher’s counter. Diane’s fingers itched for a cigarette. 

‘Don’t feed her ego, for Christ’s sake,’ Albert said, ‘it’s as bloated enough as it is. The mystique wears off, I can assure you.’

‘Fuck you, Albert.' By rote but with no less feeling.

He handed her a page from his clipboard. It was a double diagram, the splayed outline of a naked man and his identical twin facing opposite directions. The illustration familiar from a lifetime’s worth of autopsy transcriptions. 

‘For a real challenge you can try colouring within the lines.’

‘What is this, kindergarten?’ said Diane, but took the proffered worksheet and pencil despite her curled lip. 

‘I was struck by Agent Rosenfield’s unconventional note-taking methodology,’ confided Constance, grey eyes bright with interest. There was familiar click as she loaded a fresh cassette into the machine perched on the counter, its microphone angled outward like the barrel of a gun. Diane eyed it warily. If she wasn’t mistaken, Albert was now bristling with something that was as close to embarrassment as his perfectly curated lack of expression could get. 

‘I’m a connoisseur of old technology,’ he grunted, stony-faced. ‘So sue me.’

‘I meant the way you talk out loud. For someone so systematic, the personal mode of address surprised me.’ 

Diane opened her mouth but Albert deftly cut her question off at the pass, ears tinged freshly red. A precipice opened up beneath her as she watched him carefully choosing his words, the way he spat them out as if that might render them meaningless. ‘I talk to Gordon,’ he explained flatly. ‘In the tapes. He’s the only one that ever listens to them, so why not give him a show? I like to think he appreciates it.’

Only the two of them left. Two voices echoing across an absent void. 

Something in Diane’s heart crumbled, fell in. Constance was busy with the recorder, unaware of the way Albert was fixedly avoiding Diane’s eyes as he coughed and buried himself in his notes. 

‘Who should I talk to?’ Constance asked, looking between them with patient enquiry. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know Director Cole very well. Do you think he’d mind?’

Diane scribbled a circle on the printed man’s head, then bisected his torso with a thick line. He soon sprouted a fan of extra arms: her very own psychedelic Vitruvian Man complete with sunglasses and a bad moustache grafted straight out of a 70s porn film. Her attention was so absorbed by the importance of this task she successfully ignored Albert’s dour glare in her direction. 

‘Talk to me, what do I care? Talk to Diane. Hell, talk to Puff the Magic Dragon,’ said Albert brusquely. ‘I assure you, Doctor, it makes not one iota of difference.’

‘Alright,’ Constance murmured. The familiar clunk of the record button and pitched whir of the tape tipped over the carefully constructed walls shored up against the edges of Diane’s memory. She shuddered. It made one hell of a difference, fuck Albert for saying it didn’t, fuck him to hell —

‘Diane,’ said Constance Talbot of Buckhorn, South Dakota, fixing Diane with a brief smile that thoroughly disarmed the scream perched at the edge of her throat. It was warm, close-lipped and crooked, no mirror image to Cooper or anything that came after him. ‘It’s 2.35pm, September 29th... I am conducting the autopsy of William Matthew Hastings at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With me today are Senior Agent Albert Rosenfield and yourself, Diane —’

‘Evans,’ croaked Diane. She felt ancient, emptied out. Even her name felt wrong in her mouth. 

‘Diane Evans. Obviously present is Mr. Hastings, male, approximately 6 foot 4 inches, forty-nine years of age. Cause of death, a real no-brainer. It doesn’t take a forensic pathologist to see that the victim is missing half his cerebral matter, right Diane? Many of members of the Buckhorn PTA have been saying the same for years…’ 

Diane let out a choked laugh, blinking back the wetness in her eyes as Constance’s voice drifted past and grounded her to the here and now with its unfamiliar cadence and upbeat rhythm. It forced her to pay attention. She looked down to see her pencil puncturing the page, a shattered nib. 

Today her nails, she noticed with sharp surprise, were painted red and blue. 

***

The rest of the autopsy went by in a wet blur of bone-saw and exposed innards. Diane’s headache was miraculously gone, so distracted was she by Constance’s careful dissection of the man on the table. It had looked worse in the car. Here the gore was so muted and abstract it stirred no feeling whatsoever. She had once escaped from the dull clutches of a Bureau-mandated conference in New York to stand for an hour in front of Bacon’s _Three Studies for a Crucifixion_ instead, which invoked in her such a potent wave of nausea she had been forced to flee the museum to throw up her lunch in the street. Hastings’ body seemed less real than that. 

Constance hummed while she worked, directing her comments to where Diane sat in the corner: The cadaver had a mysterious lack of hair on his legs that could indicate a peripheral vascular problem (‘God, do you think that killed him?’ / ‘Perhaps he was training for the Tour-de-France’); there was blood under his fingernails; brain matter was leaking from his ears. There was a lot more colour inside him than Diane had expected. He was all De Stijl, Constance dipping her hands past slippery reds, snipping blueish intestines away from bright reams of yellow fat. Occasionally Albert would interject but kept mostly to his notes.

Diane chewed on a stick of gum and doodled some more. She drew a crude side profile and watched it morph into Constance, broken pencil adding goggles and lab coat to solidify the scene as if of its own volition. Two pinhole eyes and a frown line would do for Albert.

‘This is interesting,’ said Constance. She was at the countertop now, scalpel in hand. ‘If I asked what was in his stomach, what would you guess?’

Albert’s voice was sharp as he peered over her shoulder. ‘Don’t tell me, a miniature circus comprised of the crew from the _Fantastic Voyage_.’

Diane popped a bubble of gum. She thought of Las Vegas, said nothing. 

Constance turned to her. ‘Diane, there looks to be a series of digits seared into the lining of Hastings’ stomach. The scarring is old, but distinct. It’s incredible.’ 

‘What?’

‘There are _numbers_ in his stomach. Come and see.’

Diane looked. The stomach was flayed thinly open on the counter, and sure enough, there in the lining: faint white scars. She felt her fists clench. This was it again, delivered to her when she thought she had missed her chance like some bizarre saving grace. ‘Are those —?’

‘Let’s see… 4855…1420117…163956. Does that sound familiar?’ 

Albert nodded grimly as he flicked through the reports. ‘It’s the same as Ruth Davenport’s arm,’he said. ‘Guess the answer was inside him all along.’

‘If you’d told me that going in,’ remarked Constance lightly, shaken and excited all at once. ‘I’d have said it was a load of tripe.’

She had them now. Constance’s voice trailing the numbers out in her head, one after the other, straight from the dead man to the vault where her deepest and most unwanted memories were spliced into unreadable snippets of one long, oblique dream. Diane shook her head and let out a thin laugh. 

***

Back at the hotel, she lay on the tragic bedspread and watched the numbers dance behind her closed eyes. A knock at the door. She didn’t bother sitting up. 

‘Well, come in or fuck off,’ she called. Albert entered, closed the door behind him with a snap, and positioned himself squarely with his feet apart as if bracing for a blow.

‘Diane,’ he said.

‘Albert. To what do I owe the pleasure?’ She watched his eyes dart over the the tinfoil scrunched over the smoke detector on the ceiling, the lit cigarette in her hand, the long pause just as much a reprimand as a smart comment. She blew a smoke ring in his direction. He frowned. 

‘Do you have plans?’ Albert said. ‘This evening. And no, before you can say it, downing a bottle of schnapps and manhandling the nearest idiotically available block of chiselled muscle into your bed does not constitute as _a plan_. Be original.’

‘I thought your drinking days were done. Are you asking me out?’

‘I drink plenty, thank you very much. My drinking days spent commiserating with you in some pseudo-nouveau basement filled with a rash of insufferable beer-swilling lunkheads and oh-so-grown-up-college-kids, however, have long since died a death and I have no intention of reviving them.’

‘So what’s the alternative? Bingo night? Or have you graduated to stealing ethanol straight from the lab and sitting alone in the dark like the rest of us?’ 

‘I’m going to retract my offer and leave you to your solipsist moping if you don’t answer the damn question.’

‘No,’ Diane threw out casually, as he was stepping toward the door. ‘I don’t have any plans.’

Albert rubbed his face. He had gotten old somewhere along the line, but then again so had she. They were both too tired for this game. ‘It’s more of a favour, really. Think of it as earning that tin star,’ he said. ‘You remember how it was like being outside Blue Rose for so long, those moments when you could scream at the illogic of it all or spike Gordon’s coffee with arsenic rather than deal with the patently impossible as if it was just another quirk of the job? It has an effect.’ 

‘I _did_ quit, Albert. You should think about doing the same.’

‘The people at the edge of it don’t get any more immunity than the rest of us. There’s still no protocol for it.’

Diane sat up, cigarette smouldering in her fingers, and fixed him with a flat glare. ‘You want me to talk to her,’ she stated. ‘Christ.’

‘It could be a help. Come on, Evans, don’t tell me you’d pass up a chance to drink on the Bureau’s tab.’

‘What’s the catch?’

‘Nothing. You show up, have a few drinks; commiserate about the absurd mysteries of the strange forces of the universe, extol the virtues of a life more ordinary, that sort of thing. Throw her a bone but not the carcass. We don’t want her getting more involved than she already is.’

‘I didn’t realise you had gotten so sentimental.’

‘Besides, I think you could do with a change of face, seeing as you’ve spent the last few days looking like you’d enjoy nothing better than to smother Gordon in his sleep. She’s an interesting woman. Surprisingly competent compared with the cretinous gorillas usually native to these parts.’

‘If I didn’t know better, I’d assume you were head over heels.’

Albert crossed his arms, scowl deepening. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. 'Although Gordon did seem excessively suggestive during our last de-briefing, which is rich since he was the one that told me I had to APPRECIATE WOMEN’S TREMENDOUS SOULS AND MINDS AS WELL AS THEIR BODIES after I made a somewhat facetious comment regarding his lady-caller of the hour. Have you seen his latest? I’m considering defecting to H.R. just to spare what shrinking sanity I have left.’

‘It’s good to know Gordon is still as infuriating as ever.’

‘So will you do it?’

She considered him, dear in his own way even after all these years, like an old dog that had never had the decency to die. It wouldn’t be so bad to get out of the damn hotel room, shake the numbers from her head with a change of scenery and an excuse to ignore the persistent impulse to check her cellphone every other minute. Its dark screen stared blankly at her from the bed like a mouth without teeth. Diane flipped it over and tipped back on the duvet, cigarette smoke trailing above her as she let out a world-weary sigh.

‘Alright. I’ll meet her,’ she said. 'The drinks better be fucking good, Rosenfield, or I’m out of there.’

***

A full wardrobe change later, Diane made her way down the darkened stairwell of O’Donovan’s Lounge to find a dimly-lit basement populated with mahogany tables and vintage green-shaded desk lamps, straight out of a forgotten film about old-fashioned bankers and prohibition. The stage was spotlit; a woman stood in its glow crooning a soft song. The thick black curtain backdrop turned her into a newspaper cutout, hazy around the edges, pressed between memories of familiar seedy cabarets and gin-joints from years gone by. Diane wound her way across the floor. Constance sat in a booth, face angled toward the stage, white lab coat and rubber gloves replaced by a sensible grey pantsuit and crisp button-down. 

‘The doorman tried to direct me backstage,’ said Diane by way of greeting. ‘Whatever you do, don’t try to make me sing for my supper. I charge a mean rate.’

Constance gave a quick smile. ‘They do stand-up at the weekends, if that’s your cup of tea. I come here every other week when it’s not my turn with the kids.’

Kids. Diane had forgotten that choice detail. She slipped into the booth and considered the cocktail menu. ‘Divorced?’

‘Three years.’

‘Well, congratulations.’

They ordered drinks. Diane watched Constance sip her whiskey sour and as she accepted her own vodka martini, the same drink she had been nursing at the bar when Albert showed up half-drowned and unwelcome as a black spot on the lung or the brain, there after so many years of clean health to lure her back into the depths of Gordon’s bullshit. She should have left town that very night. 

‘It’s a funny story, really,’ said Constance. 'Twelve years of being married to a very nice, perfectly suitable man — just the one you’d want as the father of your children. Didn’t mind the long nights at the lab, took the kids fishing on the weekends. That’s the best you could hope for, right?’ 

‘I would’ve thrown in a few condoms to the mix, but sure.’

‘I was working late one evening. A car crash victim, trauma all over, looked like a side of beef by the time he made it to my table. I was removing the shattered steering column from his chest cavity when I realised, clear as anything, that I had never liked men in the first place. It all fell away, just like that. I went home and asked for a divorce, and here we are.’ Constance gave a little flourish with her plastic straw. ‘My husband was very good about it, all things considered. We’re still good friends.’

It was not what Diane had been expecting, not so candidly and not in this backwater town. ‘Just like that?’

‘It was like waking up from a dream. I just knew. Like it had been inside myself all along.’

Diane felt her stomach flip. She said, ‘I think I know what you mean.’

The woman onstage finished singing to a smattering of light applause. A black man proceeded to slap out an irregular walking rhythm on his half-sized double bass, notes twanging wildly around the scale. The waiter came with more drinks. Constance tapped out a rhythm on the table; thin fingers, blunted nails.

‘So,’ Diane said after a pause. ‘I hear you have questions. I don’t know why I’m the one to tell you this, but there aren’t any fucking answers.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

There was a gleam of curiosity in Constance’s eyes as she gazed across the table, an all too familiar earnest interest. God, had Diane been like that back when the first reports crossed her desk and the descent into stranger territory began? She hoped not. The feeling of being on the outside, though, that had never changed. They kept her out in the cold and expected her to believe in their bullshit assurances and sign their NDAs, and accept that sooner or later they would all disappear from her orbit without so much as a goodbye, as if it was all part of the greater plan; like one of Earle’s madcap, inscrutable games of chess. She had never liked being played.

‘I could do this bit for a few more hours,’ Diane sucked the juice from the martini’s lemon twist and made a face, ‘but I’d only end up boring us both. What do you want to know?’

Surprise flitted across Constance’s face, but only for an instant. She leaned in. ‘Who exactly is the man — the major?’ she asked eagerly, words gathering pace with each question. ‘What killed Ruth and Bill? Where and _what_ is the Zone?’ 

Diane snorted. ‘Fuck, you’re prepared. Let me see.’ She lifted three red-tipped fingers and counted down the facts as she knew them, dispassionately and without flourish. Briggs, a passing player in an old case; a man thought dead. If E.T. phoned home, he’d be the first to know. Davenport and Hastings, who the fuck knew? The Zone, part of a glacial Russian film unless she was very much mistaken — no, she had not seen any blog or esoteric ramblings online. No, her companions had not shared the salient points with her, thank you very much. If Constance was disappointed with the lack of detail she hid it well, nodding at every other word, grey eyes wide with interest. 

‘Do I mark the bodies in my fridge down as Accident, Unknown, Homicide, or Pending?’ she asked. ‘I’m guessing we can rule out suicide.’ 

‘Fuck the paperwork, that’s the best advice you’ll get,’ Diane said. ‘I’m out in the cold — by choice, I might add. That’s probably why they sent me: to hand over a primer for the maddeningly weird and nothing more. Rod Serling, eat your heart out. ’

‘Less mind-blowing than I had hoped, but…’

Diane snorted into her glass. ‘I can see why Albert likes you.’

‘I’m afraid I made a fool of myself in front of him,’ Constance admitted, covering her eyes.

‘Being made a fool by Albert is a kind of initiation,’ grunted Diane. ‘If you can make it through the introductory thresher of verbal annihilation and come out fighting, you’ll have his loyalty for life. Not that he’d admit that to your face.’

‘He asked me to dinner. I said it had been fifteen years since I last went on a date with a man and I didn’t intend to start now, to which he accused me of stealing his line, but that he didn’t see what that had to do with anything. I’ve never felt like such a presumptive ass.’

‘That’s relatively tame, by his standards.’ 

Another drink, a warm comfort in her belly. Diane leaned back and studied her companion: Constance with her sleeves rolled up now, thin forearms and splayed competent hands lined with veins. Hands she had last seen inside a corpse. A grotesque certainty that if those hands were to touch her own skin they would go right through, reaching into her organs, slipping around in serosanguineous fluid and syrupy clots of gunk. They might even find answers in there. It was undeniable that she felt dislocated, wrenched out of place like a shoulder or a jaw; there was a chance this woman could feel out that source of pain and somehow put everything back into place. Her body was terribly wrong. She looked down at her own hands then looked at Constance’s nimble fingers, perfect for holding a heart or spleen or tar-blackened lung. 

‘Do you play the clarinet?’ Diane asked. The question surprised her. 

‘Bassoon. Or I used to, at any rate. I can’t say I was very good.’

Constance brushed a silver streak of hair out of her eyes, and the moment broke. Her hand was just a hand. 

‘Tell me something else,’ Diane said a little desperately. ‘Anything, it doesn’t matter.’ 

Constance considered the question for a long while. She toyed with her glass, then leaned in across the table, her gaze steady and conspiratorial. Diane moved closer. They were so close she could smell the other woman’s scent, faint and fresh as a bed of pine-needles. 

‘There was another thing,’ Constance said in a low voice. ‘With Ruth Davenport’s body. She had a mediastinal haemorrhage, a couple of fractured ribs, the kind of right-sided trauma you’d normally see in a case where a first-responder administers CPR. But it begs the question…’

‘…Why try to resuscitate a body without a head?’

Christ. She had been hoping for something light. The scene stretched out before them: a weeping William Hastings hunched over his lover’s decapitated corpse in a futile act of denial, blood seeping from the severed neck and onto the ground. The man’s wailing getting louder and louder with each desperate pump of her heart.

‘Bill must have been in shock,’ said Constance, ‘thinking irrationally, maybe it was reflexive. But I can’t get the image out of my mind.’

Diane felt slightly sick. ‘Yeah. Fuck, that’s harsh.’

‘Still, there could be merit to it. The idea of trying to save something despite the improbability.’

At the nearest table, an old man in a crushed velvet suit struggled with an ice-cream float. The soft vanilla oozed down the glass in a slow sludge that made Diane think of something else that came creamed and similarly viscous. Corn? But that was ridiculous. The framed ear of corn in Gordon’s office as an antidote to deafness (“I’M ALL EARS, DIANE”), the thought only coming to her now, and hadn’t that picture been put there by Phillip Jefferies, patron saint of the unuttered implication and the displaced? 

The images shattered in her head.

‘Sounds fucking pointless to me’ said Diane with an insouciant shrug. ‘An exercise in futility and a damn waste of breath.’ 

Resurrecting a corpse, as if belief alone could make it so, was like sitting in a prison visiting-room asking for a miracle. That man had been a shade off: too deep, too slow, too close to the real Cooper — the Coopershe carried with her wherever she went — that the jarring dissimilarity had been made all the more apparent. She might blot out everything else, blot it all out with alcohol and derision and a vast side-helping of compartmentalisation, but she’d be damned if she ever forgot the sound of his voice. The click of the dictaphone. _Diane, I am sitting in a vast red room and the roses are in bloom —_

Were they the unfortunate Bill Hastings trying to pump life back into a long dead corpse, unable to see that the spark inside it was long gone? Diane shuddered. 

‘Do you really think that?’ Constance asked. Her hand was very close to Diane’s own. ‘That hope, misplaced, is worse than no hope at all?’

Diane rolled her eyes. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She sighed. ‘I feel like you ought to be debriefing me, not the other way around. Got any more spooky stories?’ 

‘Show don’t tell, isn’t that what they say?’ Constance said, ‘We can get out of here, if you want.’

Diane drained her whiskey and stood up. The band was playing out a dreamy number, all sliding snare and mournful jazz, the place slipping into that slow groove that signalled the night was coming to a close. What had Albert said about not getting involved? He should have known she would take that as an invitation to do the opposite, more fool him. She offered Constance a hand. 

‘Why not?’ Diane said. ‘Besides, I’m dying for a cigarette.’

***

Breaking into an empty lot wasn’t the end to the evening Diane had anticipated when she agreed to meet the local coroner for drinks, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting alone in a stuffy hotel room. The chainlink fence was emblazoned with a rusted NO TRESPASSING sign, one that they thoroughly ignored as Constance lifted a corner of the fence and crouched under it with practiced ease. Diane managed to shimmy through the gap in the gnarled wire with her hair-do and dignity intact. There was a dark patch of empty ground among the scrubby grass, faintly blackened and ashen like ground chalk. Diane joined Constance at its centre and peered down at the spot. 

‘Don’t tell me, it’s haunted,’ said Diane. ‘Is this Buckhorn’s very own ghost tour?’

‘If it is, I would’ve thought I’d be the first to know,’ Constance laughed. ‘I used to live here when I was a kid. Our house burned down when I was five. I keep hoping they’ll build something on it, like a park or a bakery or something but the planning never gets off the ground.’ She scuffed the ground with her shoe.

‘Do you come here a lot?’

‘Not really. It’s just a thing to say to people. My parents burned to death in a fire — isn’t that sad?’

‘Jesus.’

‘I don’t remember much. My memory got a little, hah, fried. All I know is my brother pulled me out of bed and we waited a long time on the sidewalk. He prayed for rain; I watched the house burn down. The fireman gave us a chocolate bar each afterwards, I remember _that._ ’

Constance’s face was perfectly calm, voice pitched like she was delivering a mildly funny story that had happened to someone else a very long time ago. It could have happened to Diane, for all she knew. At times her own memories felt as if they had been excised by some unseen hand and laid out in neat rows for her own inspection; perhaps she had been the one to wield the knife. The night was quiet enough to keep a secret or two. 

‘I have a sister,’ said Diane. ‘Well, half-sister.’ The words came out fully formed before she could stop them. 

‘Yeah?’

‘If our house burned down I think I would’ve left her there. Just to see if she could make it by herself.’ She lit a cigarette and breathed in the smoke gratefully, let it fill her up.The tip glowing in the dark like a bright orange eye or the shrunken window of burning house. ‘You couldn’t pay to me to play the hero in that story, that’s for sure.’

‘Why are you here, then?’ Constance asked. 

‘Duty or stupidity, take your pick.’ Diane shivered in the chill air, cursing her foolish choice to forgo a coat when wearing an outfit that revealed more skin than necessary for a casual meet-up. She could feel Constance’s eyes on her. The smoke burned her lungs. That was what killed you first in a house-fire, said the grim voice in her head that sounded a shade too similar to Albert for her liking: the smoke, not the flames, choking and thick. She said, ‘Maybe I’m just curious to see how it all pans out.’ 

Constance shrugged off her blazer. Diane let her reach up to drape it over her shoulders, too grateful for the warmth to care about the selfishness of it, and allowed her tight smile to reach her eyes for a change. It was nice, she decided, being away from the the oppressive silence that stretched out in the space between her, Gordon, Albert whenever they were in a room together. The way the conversation stopped when she entered a room as if they’d just finished talking about her, unsaid words so obvious even Gordon couldn’t pretend not to notice. This silence was different. More familiar and more transparent as Constance lowered her hands, eyes flickering from the blazer to Diane’s face. 

‘I—’ she said, then paused. ‘I think you’re missing an earring?’

_Shit._ Diane felt her right ear, conspicuously unladen by the chunky geometric acrylics that were her choice of accessory for the night. ‘They were from a gentleman caller. Unsentimental value,’ said Diane, but Constance was already scanning the ground with the flashlight on her phone. ‘Say what you will, but his taste was good.’

‘That’s clear,’ noted Constance. ‘He was with you.’

Diane dropped to a crouch and felt around in the dirt with both hands, but the dirt was unforthcoming. Her phone was in her pocket but she didn’t want to use it. The remaining earring brushed against her neck as she felt around, its pair just one more thing to grope for in the dark. Lost things always came in pairs. That seemed important. 

‘You’d think after all this time this lot’d be one fucking jungle,’ Diane grunted after a few long moments of protracted silence. ‘Isn’t fire meant to make the soil more fertile, or is that some kind of pro-arsonist propaganda?’

The flashlight flared through Constance’s flyaway hair and made strange planes of her face, spilling across the empty ground. ‘Sometimes scorched earth is just scorched earth,’ she said. ‘Something doesn’t have to come of it.’ 

‘That’s pretty nihilistic.’

‘Just practical. Oh, look.’ Constance’s face lit up as she turned to Diane with the earring dangling from her hand. ‘Here it is!’ She leaned in to reattach it to its proper place and Diane angled her head just so, feeling the silver pin sink into her ear like a hook to a fish as Constance worked the clasp with her clever fingers. She held her breath.

A sudden buzz shattered the night air. They jumped apart, startled, looking around at the empty lot before Diane remembered the phone in her pocket. She took it out. Another buzz as a new text came in, and a heavy weight settled in Diane’s stomach. There was no caller ID. 

Constance sat back and laughed. ‘That scared the hell out of me,’ she said. ‘Do you need to get that?’

Diane stared at the notification until the screen went black. A sneaking suspicion that Albert had enlisted Constance to keep an eye on her crept into her mind; wasn’t it possible that he knew something, that he suspected? All those flat looks, those long silences. What did she really know of him, after all these years? He carried a gun now, for Christ’s sake. People changed. 

‘It’s nothing,’ Diane rasped. She tucked the phone away. ‘Just my florist. I usually buy flowers on Fridays. Anything but roses.’

It struck her they had come there for a reason — this was a place where things were lost and sometimes found. Constance had given her the numbers as well as the lost earring, hadn’t she? She was close and blinking nervously in the sudden quiet and Diane wanted to kiss her, so she did. It wasn’t a bad kiss. They were both off-balance and Diane ended up with her hands fisted in the collar of Constance’s shirt and Constance kissed her back, and Diane knew it could mean everything or it could mean nothing and that she didn’t care which one it was. It was real enough. She had nothing to hide. The pounding of her heart settled down to a slow bass drum as she pulled away, tried to keep her breathing steady and her voice cool. 

‘So no ghosts. A fittingly bathetic end to the evening,’ she said with a small hard laugh. ‘Fuck, count that as the end of our introductory investigative session. For every instance of strange, there’s fifty moments of severe normality. Consider yourself warned.’

Constance’s cheeks were flushed but her tone remained calm, if a little uneven. ‘If that’s what you call normal,’ she quipped, as she helped Diane to her feet. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.’

It was easier climbing under the fence this time with Constance at her side. Diane’s phone stayed quiet the whole long walk home. 

***

‘It’s two in the goddamn morning.’

Albert glowered at her from the doorway as Diane raided his minibar. She had considered going to bed but had decided it was worth risking Albert’s ire if she could get a glimpse of him in his pyjamas.  ‘Too late for a nightcap?’ she asked, cracking open a tiny bottle of merlot as she dropped heavily into a leather armchair. ‘Or do you only drink Gordon’s exclusive supply?’

‘Some of us have other more pressing priorities at this hour, like sleeping. Perhaps you’d like to try it sometime, if it wouldn’t ruin your bohemian image to an irredeemable degree.’

Albert shoved his hands in his dressing gown pockets and frowned. She half-expected to see the cuff of his customary suit peeking out from the flannel. Diane made a face at the muted black-and-white Tony Curtis movie playing out on the television beside her, and said, ‘Don’t you want to ask?’

‘Ask what.’

‘How it went with Doctor Talbot.’

‘I _want_ you to get out of my room,’ he said. She raised an eyebrow and began massaging her sore feet. ‘I’d like to think you were studiously professional, vague to a fault, and uncharacteristically slow to display the full range of your usual quiddities. Though if you did send her screaming for the Black Hills, that wouldn’t be so unfavourable an outcome.’ 

‘I told her you were hiring,’ Diane said innocently, and watched as his eyebrows knitted into one flat line in record time. ‘We had a good time. I like her.’

‘Yes. So do I.’

‘No offence, Albert, but I think I like her more than you.’

Even if Constance was reporting back to the FBI, it was doubtful she had included that choice detail — and if she had, Albert certainly did a believable job at cycling from jaded tiredness to tired disbelief in the space of a heartbeat.

‘ _Diane._ You didn’t.’

‘Don’t expect me to kiss and tell. You never cared to hear all that, before.’

He snatched the bottle from her grip and sat on the bed; she flashed him a cheshire grin, content to bask on her laurels. Some things hadn’t changed, even all these years later. He swigged the dregs of wine as if she had a gun pointed in his direction and clasped his hands on his knees with a sigh. Old man’s hands. Her own might have been sewed on from one of the morgue’s more emaciated corpses. It was the lateness of the hour that gave things a strange edge. Albert levelled a flat stare in her direction and grunted, ‘Have you been having any dreams?’ 

That was something Cooper used to ask. Her sleep was populated by a blackness so dense it frightened her as she closed her eyes each night, but she did not dream. She used to before. What the _before_ implied she couldn’t remember, but the thought made her stomach give a sick gymnastic flip. 

‘No,’ said Diane. ‘I don’t fucking dream.’

Albert dragged a weary hand over his jaw. ‘I had one, the night after we saw Cooper,’ he said slowly, voice gone to gravel. ‘He cut my throat open with a straight razor.’ 

She could feel the static thrumming from the television screen, the way it used to be before flatscreens and high definition. The tiny hairs on her arms stood on end. She swallowed. There was too much chrome in the room, reflecting back her own expressionless face. 

‘Have you considered shaving-related anxiety? You never subscribed to any of that bullshit anyway… or have you become a believer in your old age? God, Albert.’

‘ _Don’t,_ ’ he said grimly. ‘I know.’ 

‘I don’t see how you can know anything. We’re dancing in the dark without a backing track, unless Gordon knows more than he’d have us believe. Those earbuds might pick up more than he lets on.’

He wasn’t listening to her, still caught up in whatever dark thought had made a home in his head. 

‘That…man didn’t say anything to me, you know, when we saw him. Just stared,’ he said. ‘If I had an overblown sense of self-importance and were a subscriber to the Cooper-Cole brand of mawkish mysticism, I’d say he didn’t need words. That he left the dream in my head, for later; a nice little catch-up in the astral plane. Very generous of him.’ His expression turned bitter. ‘I’m sick of scrabbling around for fucking meaning. A dead bird on my doorstep would do just fine, if he wants to leave a message.’

The phone in her pocket hummed with a low electric charge against her leg. She was sick of intuition, and memory, and the feeling of _wrongness_ in her chest that got worse and worse the more she tried to forget about it. If Cooper had cut out her throat she wouldn’t be like this. She almost wished he had — but he had grinned instead, grinned wide enough to split his face wide open. 

‘I’ve said for years you should grow a beard,’ Diane said, heading for the door. 'I could do with a laugh.’

***

Her phone buzzed in the corridor, and a cold bolt of dread whipped through her body but it was only Constance. _I had a good time tonight,_ her text said. Diane thought about hands on her face — outside her body, proof that she was alive. The taste of her lips on hers. Her heart may be fallow as a burnt patch of earth behind a rusted fence, but it still pumped blood, and she’d be damned if that was going to change anytime soon. 

She would send the numbers tomorrow. For now she would sleep a dreamless sleep, and quiet the spreading sense of unease that waited under the surface of her mind with better, more recent thoughts. She could always drop by the morgue in the morning. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments appreciated :)


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